Just then Lenox heard a voice behind him, and every nerve in his body went taut.

“An orchid, for the lady of the house,” it said, in a tone that had once sounded arrogant to his ears but now sounded sinister as well.

“Why, thank you, Mr. Barnard,” said Lady Nevin graciously. “How kind you are to a poor widow.”

Lenox half-turned, if only to confirm that it was indeed George Barnard.

He was a powerful man, aged fifty or so, who had served time in Parliament and just finished a successful stint as Master of Great Britain’s Royal Mint. He had retired into private life with an eye toward the House of Lords; judicious donations to the correct charities (and he was opulently rich, if nothing else) were, society assured him, enough to earn a title to match his wealth. He was a self-made man who had grown up somewhere in the north of England, which London associated, to the region’s detriment, with factories and soot, but he had shaken off that dubious birth to rise to his current heights. He was well liked now and known for the beautiful orchids he grew himself and always brought to parties-or, if there wasn’t one at its peak, a bowl of the oranges and lemons he grew in his green house.

He was also, Lenox felt with complete certainty, the most dangerous man in London.

For many years his feelings toward Barnard had been neutral. Lenox had gone to the man’s parties and suppers and met him in society. Two years before, that had changed.

It was a famous case, which Lenox had been proud to solve. One of Barnard’s maids had been killed, and while Barnard was innocent of that crime-his two nephews had committed the murder-in the course of his investigation Lenox had discovered something shocking: Barnard had stolen nearly twenty thousand pounds of the Mint’s money for himself. Once he knew this, Lenox began to trace a whole host of crimes back to Barnard, carefully taking notes on the unsolved mysteries in Scotland Yard’s files and developing a dossier on them.